


And the shame was on the other side

by actonbell



Category: Atomic Blonde (2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Delphine lives, F/F, Fake Character Death, Fix-It, Kissing, New York City, Past Violence, Post-Canon, way too many literary references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-08
Updated: 2017-08-08
Packaged: 2018-12-12 19:14:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11743407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/actonbell/pseuds/actonbell
Summary: If it's a game she'll play, like the chessmen. If it's a trick she'll be fooled. If it's a trap she'll close her eyes, open her mouth and swallow the bait. Just to keep Delphine standing here. Just to see her.





	And the shame was on the other side

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Tiếng Việt available: [And the shame was on the other side](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11876715) by [adcsubject](https://archiveofourown.org/users/adcsubject/pseuds/adcsubject)



> WARNING: This will spoil you for the movie. It will probably also not make sense if you haven't seen it yet. See author's notes at the end for more details.
> 
> The title is from Blondie's cover of David Bowie's "Heroes": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABEqQKlWLC0

_two years after_

 

She's not _relaxed,_ she probably can't relax again in this lifetime, but she's as close as she'll maybe ever get, leaning-sitting on the low fence in front of Hangman's Tree, enjoying the shade on what most New Yorkers consider a perfect summer day: too warm but with a nice breeze, jaded locals on their lunch hour mixing with the tourists on day trips, everyone basking in the cool air coming off the fountain. It's a painter's scene: earnest guitar players mixing with absurdly young hustlers and dealers, students matching their wits against chess players so ancient they look like dried leaves, skateboarders shouting and being shouted at, shy nannies clumping together, some holding hands, a few men with broken noses in silk suits eating hot dogs and talking with their mouths full. It's the height of democracy, the melting pot at full bubbling boil -- what did Socrates call it? A feverish bazaar, something like that. Her memory's not what it was. Too many lies to forget.

The heavy marble arch and the statues remind her too much of Europe, and the impromptu stage around the fountain is much too open and full of photographers, amateur and pro, but the old great hanging tree is perfect: shadow and cover. She knows this place served as a potter's field and then a burying ground during yellow fever epidemics, that there are tens of thousands of bodies under the dappled oasis where people are skateboarding, flirting, playing chess, buying dope, eating hotdogs. They're all standing on graves, living right over the dead. It's the same everywhere once you think about it. Some things never change, can't change, although it would be nice if they did. _Wouldn't it be pretty to think so._

She hasn't chosen a new name yet. She wants it to stick, when she does. When she got her top clearance at Langley Kurzfeld had shredded her passport and birth certificate in front of her, a ritual and a demonstration: _now you can be anyone._ Later on she'd learned he performed that little drama with all his hand-picked operatives, early on, but that didn't blunt the effect. Nobody's called her by her birth name in over ten years -- nobody's _known_ it, except Kurzfeld, for maybe that long. She wonders what she would say if she could magically whisk back in time, this older self with a lacerated cornea and ruptured discs and boxer's knuckles confronting that stupid unbruised bright-eyed girl, not even twenty-one. Not even as old as Delphine or Merkel had been. It's her "real name" again, the one on her bank accounts and apartment leases, but it's the one that feels the most like an alias. What would she have been by now, that stranger who doesn't pop a handful of pain pills to get up in the morning, who thinks _betrayal_ is shit like people fucking around on each other? Married, divorced, a mother, a translator? That was why they had plucked her out of the running stream of college life, after all, like tickling a trout: _your Russian professor says you're a natural. And you study martial arts? Judo, right?_ She'd been so _stupidly_ proud of her oh-so-unique accomplishments, not realizing she was just ticking off every single box on their list. _Have you ever fired a gun?_ She'd laughed; her father had taught her how to shoot and fish before she was ten. Would she say to that girl eager for adventure, _Stop, no, don't do it, spend your life teaching bored freshmen Russian verbs of going_ instead?

She stirs, restless, trying to brush away her own thoughts, and thinks she sees a girl who looks like Delphine -- as much as anyone could look _like_ her -- approaching her through the crowd. That had happened so often it made her sick, the first six months or so, every time she saw a head of shining black hair, caught a glance from dancing dark eyes. But that first split second of stabbing painful hope and elation is always followed by disappointment so crushing it makes her want to go home and go to bed with a bottle for the rest of the day. Impossible to say if what they'd shared had been "real" -- or if it had been more real than anything else. She'd been more terrified than Delphine, deep down, knowing death was the best thing that could happen to her if the op blew up, wondering if she'd died inside already a long time ago and this was all some version of Hell. And Delphine had been so brave, so foolish -- whispering to her, like a lover's token, _Percy knows who you are -- no, wait -- who you_ really _are. And he's someone else too._ She'd fought so hard, done him so much damage; it barely took one gunshot to finish him off. She'd probably seen one too many Bond movies and decided she was going to be Bond, not the Bond Girl. God damn the movies. Beautiful impossibly brave little fool. 

She sits frozen because her body has finally convinced her that no, somehow, that is _Delphine_ walking towards her, different enough from her memories that it's not mistaken perception and wishful thinking fooling her yet again. This Delphine isn't wearing some version of the costume everyone had in Berlin, all black leather and attitude, but she's still chic in a pair of jeans and clingy long-sleeved high-necked pink top. Barely-there sandals showing off toenails polished pink to match her shirt. She looks like an exchange student, clutching a big leather satchel strapped across her shoulder and a small brown paper bag in one hand that could hold a gun, or her lunch. 

She sits very still, not wanting to scare Delphine away if she's a ghost, if they're both ghosts. Delphine smiles at her. She wants to smile back, say hello, say _something,_ but her mouth's dry, vocal cords paralyzed. Kurzfeld would be laughing his ass off if he could see her at this moment. She closes her eyes deliberately, waits a few seconds and opens them again, but Delphine's still there. 

"Hi," Delphine says in her own throaty voice, a little flirty, a little abashed, vulnerable yet reaching out, knowing what she wants, purely _her._ How, how is this possible? Clones, body doubles, hallucinations, resurrections? _The dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall all be changed._ In the twinkling of an eye. Impossible for this to be some kind of _reward,_ for her life. If it's a punishment, it's a good start.

"Hi," she croaks back, and Delphine's smile widens, gets impossibly sweeter, even more _her._ Well, if she's finally gone completely gaga, this isn't such a bad way to lose touch with reality.

Delphine tilts her head, all those curls and tendrils cut into a sleek black cap now, also very chic, but still satin-soft, just the way it looks an invitation to run your fingers through it. She clenches her fists in her pockets. "You're not mad," Delphine observes, sounding puzzled, but delighted.

The idea of being _angry_ at this dizzying miracle, this unasked-for undreamt-of impossible resurrection, is so ludicrous she wants to laugh, and even smiles. She wants to lean forward, brush her mouth against Delphine's, shut her eyelids with kisses, bury her face against that beautiful neck, and digs her nails hard into her palms. "No. No, how could I -- no."

Delphine edges out of the occasional foot traffic going by the elm, coming up close, standing right in front of her: if she stood up they'd be close enough to embrace. Stabbing distance. Close to she's even more of a miracle, neck unmarred, eyes bright and focused, not glassy and still, her heart pumping her blood along in her veins under her skin. Not dead. _Here._ "How," she manages, her voice scraping out of her throat, a raw and broken sound, embarrassing -- it's the way someone would sound if they'd lost everything. Anything that meant a damn.

Delphine's face twists in sympathy -- that was what had killed her, her generous heart: exposing Percival, exposing Stachel too, and not doing anything with the intel, not using it as any kind of weapon, trying to save her instead. (Trying to _save. Her -- )_ And then _threatening_ Percival, leaving the photographs for Lorraine, acting as if she could make a difference. As if what they did could ever have a moral dimension. "DGSE had tapped my phone," Delphine says. _Well, of course._ "When I called Percival....they knew I knew, about you, you know. I was HUMINT -- that was what I was doing, before they got me to join, just a little here and there, when I was still a civilian." She nods: exactly the same route she'd taken. Thought she'd taken: the route they'd both been eased along, sacrificial lambs herded gently to the altar. "All of a sudden, they showed up, grabbed me, and there was another girl -- she looked just like me! -- they had her wear my clothes, act a little stupid, you know, with the packing and the headphones." Delphine looks down, shifts the wide leather strap on her shoulder, moves her weight from one foot to the other and back again. "I knew they were setting us up -- I wanted to leave a note for you, a sign. Something. But they wouldn't let me." 

She reaches out and puts her hand on Delphine's arm, the one holding the paper bag, so Delphine can't try to hold her hand or break her wrist. The bag's weight swings with the motion, but feels much too light for a gun. A knife maybe. "I know, I know what they do. Believe me." She wonders if Delphine knew the name of the other girl, if anyone did; if she was buried under Delphine's name, the way Lorraine Broughton disappeared into Somerset. 

Delphine gives her a watery smile and goes on: "Then they tried to debrief me, asked me a lot of questions about you. I lied, said I'd been drunk a lot. Mainly they wanted to know how I knew to follow Percy, they were still hungry, you know, after Farewell. Like I had some special trick! It was just nobody trusting _anybody._ And he was way out there, you could see it. Not out there like people get when they've been in the field too long. He wanted everyone to think that. But he was different."

"You trusted me," she says, "you _told_ me...." and for a horrible moment she thinks she's going to cry, clutching this returned dead girl's arm in the sunny Manhattan park, in front of the jugglers and the pretzel vendors and the children splashing in the fountain, let the anguish force open her jaws and rip its way out of her mouth. Delphine lets go of the leather strap and actually pats her shoulder. 

"I did, I did," she says, in a tender voice like she's soothing a child. "But it all worked out okay anyway, see? I did what you told me, I got out of the field. I went into photointelligence. -- Desk job! I'm here on vacation."

That tears it, she has to laugh, and if the sound is somewhere between a screech and a sob only a few tourists are briefly distracted. Delphine gently swipes a thumb under one eye, the damaged one -- her peripheral vision is now forever blurry on that side. Reason enough to retire, and be cautious in retirement. She could never have seen this one coming, though. "How did you find me?" she asks, settling down now. If this is a game or a trap or a trick, or just her own mind finally turning on itself, she might as well see where it goes. 

If it's a test, she's already failed, failed so many times: failed when she used Delphine, when she used James, when she used all of them -- Percival even, when she told so many lies it seemed the truth was drowned out for good and the whole bright living breathing world might as well have been a dream. All of her is still waiting for the other shoe to drop, for this sunny afterlife to be the result of the D.T's or Soviet doctors probing her brain or the Company sending her on the worst of bad trips, trying to wring one more drop of data out of her. She can't even think what this would be testing -- should she run? Kiss Delphine in front of everyone? Try to kill her, with her bare hands? Take out as many civilians around her as she can, because certainly even now more than half the people in any crowd she's in are trained on her like weapons? If failing means she gets to sit here, sun and shadow alternating on her skin and Delphine in front of her, smiling, and nothing behind her but the hanging tree, maybe it's what she really wants. 

If it's a game she'll play, like the chessmen. If it's a trick she'll be fooled. If it's a trap she'll close her eyes, open her mouth and swallow the bait. Just to keep Delphine standing here. Just to see her.

Delphine's talking, but she missed it. She shakes her head, looks down, embarrassed. That kind of inattention gets you killed. "Sorry, I....sorry."

"No, no," Delphine says easily, "it's all right," and she can't help scouring Delphine's features, looking for the lie, the giveaway. Nothing. "You told your -- real name," Delphine repeats, politely not saying it out loud, "to the boy in East Berlin, Merkel? He said _you_ said, just in case."

Had she? She had. Before they'd left on the Spyglass transfer, before she'd known for sure it was all a setup and MI6 was perfectly willing to let Percival kill her as long as they got their precious list. Would prefer it in fact, snipping off her loose end. She'd pulled the kid aside, said two words, then three more, watched his face change, then change again, back to that of an eager and willing young sergeant. He was a natural; she hoped he'd gone far -- no, no she didn't, she hoped he'd gotten out of the whole rotten business somehow, or escaped to some sort of safety within it, like Delphine had. "Is he -- all right?" she asks, not sure of what she really wants to hear.

But Delphine smiles again, a real smile, bright as the sunshine. "He's married! It's good -- he found the Stasi spy's wife, remember her? Her name's Frieda. He adopted her little girl. I spent last Christmas with them. I could give you his number, if you like."

The idea of Merkel having an ordinary life, with a wife, a daughter, a telephone, and a flat with the phone and the wife and daughter all safely inside it, like a doll's house, makes her dizzy. "I would -- I would very much, like to, yes." Delphine touches her face again, because she's crying again, not quite gasping for breath but getting there, those knife-like thrusts of inhaled sobs getting closer. Delphine kisses her forehead like a benediction, like a blessing, a saint's touch: not like any kiss she's had before, not a demand for contact or sex or pleading for the same, _help me fuck myself out of my own head,_ just the press of Delphine's mouth on her skin, barely there before being gone. Almost nothing you could feel as being real. She was definitely drunk the first time Delphine had kissed her, when she'd kissed _back,_ dead drunk but at the same time every nerve lit up with tension and suspicion, _Why the gun?_ It wasn't even paranoia by then, only the knowledge that nothing was what it seemed, nothing was real, lies were what you lived by and the truth was what killed. Not bullets or wires. In a way she'd never hidden what she was. A phantom, a ghost, a hologram. Nobody real.

But here was Delphine, real and alive in front of her, with warm hands and warm lips, her skin supple and blood-hot, not waxy and cold, the exact opposite of dead, alive like the flowers and the trees and the children. Maybe that meant what happened had been real too. Maybe. She had put so much at risk when she'd first flirted with Delphine, drawn her in, instead of smiling coldly and walking away, and she feels such a rush of regret it's like a sucker punch and now she's crying again, really crying, and gasping, "I'm sorry, so sorry, I -- I should never have -- I didn't want to leave you -- " Delphine says "Shhh, no, no, it's all right," in the same soothing voice, leaning forward and dropping the paper bag on the ground next to her (she could hook it up with her foot, grab whatever's in it, find out for once and for all -- ), and hugs her like a mother, absorbing the tears and pain and shuddering, everything. The big leather bag bumps against them and Delphine pulls her in even closer, so close she can feel the pulse in Delphine's neck, and Delphine kisses her forehead again, the same feathery brush of lips, once, twice. Under the cover of their hair, she presses her lips to the side of Delphine's throat, wanting to bite and suck to bruises, see the living blood she can draw up under the skin as proof they're both here, living and real. But she draws back and fumbles a handkerchief out of her pocket -- one of the few real British habits she hadn't been able to break, after pretending to have them for so long. (Tea is another, and she wants some desperately.)

"What's in this damn bag?" she finally asks, poking it with the toe of her shoe after wiping her face, careful of her bad eye, and has to laugh again when Delphine opens it to reveal two rather battered bagels, and cream cheese and lox -- "the real good stuff," she says, savouring the words as if she can already taste the smoky-sweet fish. They both decide _fuck it_ and hop the low railing and sit in the grassy dirt at the foot of the Hanging Tree, daring authority to come along and drag them off. Delphine makes an impromptu table out of her leather bag and the torn-apart paper bag and some napkins, and they slice the bagels and spread the cream cheese and fish in their tiny feast, their own miracles of loaves and fishes. 

She puts her arm around Delphine and Delphine rests her head of beautiful dark hair, hot from the sun, on her shoulder, and they're both alive alive _alive:_ so alive there's no need to fear or even remember death, any more than the fish in the stream would fear being tricked and hooked and swung up into the choking air.

**Author's Note:**

> I got the idea for this story when talking over the plot of the movie with my husband. Clearly Delphine warns Lorraine that Percival knows who she is and is planning to betray her. But Delphine knows Percival is a double agent for the Soviets, and at the end he warns Bremovych that Lorraine's not just a double agent for the Soviets but a triple agent for the CIA too. Wouldn't this mean that Delphine would also know that Lorraine was a triple agent? Whether it works or not, that stuck with me for some reason. I also loved Delphine and was bummed she died and wanted to write a fix-it fic for her. I am Bad at plots, so all I could think of was a _Vertigo_ -style swap where surprise, we have someone who's your double dressed in your clothes to throw off the roof, so to speak. I also liked Merkel and it bugged me we didn't find out what happened to him after Lorraine killed Bremovych, and Spyglass's wife and daughter didn't even get names! I'm a sap, so I fixed that too.
> 
>  
> 
> DGSE - the French equivalent of MI6, the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (General Directorate for External Security).
> 
> HUMINT - Human intelligence, "a category of intelligence derived from information collected and provided by human sources" as defined by NATO.
> 
> Farewell - the code name of a high-ranking KGB spy who gave information on Line X (civilian espionage) agents in France, leading to the expulsion of forty-seven Soviet agents in 1983.
> 
>  
> 
> Socrates refers to democracy as a bazaar in the _Republic._
> 
>  _Isn't it pretty to think so:_ the last line of _The Sun Also Rises._
> 
>  _The dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall all be changed:_ 1 Corinthians 15:52, KJV translation.
> 
> At the end of the graphic novel, "Lorraine Broughton" supposedly goes to visit relatives in Somerset but is actually returning to the KGB.
> 
> The CIA did administer LSD to human subjects, often without their permission, in Project MKUltra.
> 
> The Hangman's Elm is real, although probably nobody was ever hung from it (there was one hanging in the Square, but eyewitnesses put it at conflicting places).


End file.
